It all makes perfect sense. Samuel Wylde is special. He’s the rarest of flowers. He’s so rare, in fact, that his father has cast him adrift in an echoing house that he does not visit, under the protection of an icicle of a stepmother, watched over by two burly men who look like bodyguards, and treated by a cadaverous Swiss physician who believes rebellious thoughts cause epilepsy. And while we’re on the subject, Dr Arcampora, would you care to explain why your patient – whom you insist is red-eyed through diligent academic study by candlelight – looks as though he’s recently emerged from a particularly difficult exorcism?
When he tries to catch a moment with Samuel, Nicholas finds himself deftly manoeuvred aside by Isabel Wylde. The boy is tired, she says. The boy must rest. The boy cannot be overexcited, lest his sickness returns.
‘Then perhaps I might speak with young Tanner Bell,’ says Nicholas, remembering his conversation with Joshua Wylde. ‘I was told by Sir Joshua that Tanner had accompanied Samuel from Havington Manor. Is he here?’
Mercy Havington’s face lights up. ‘Yes, that would be most agreeable, madam. I would like to see young Tanner again. We miss his presence at the Manor.’
The ceruse on Isabel Wylde’s face almost cracks like an old portrait as the muscles in her jaw tighten. She lifts a hand to the crucifix again, though this time the fingertips don’t quite make it. They fall away to brush absent-mindedly at the side of her cherry-red taffeta gown, as if she’s suddenly become conscious of an unsightly stain. ‘How sad for both of you,’ she says. Nicholas waits for the accompanying apologetic smile, but it doesn’t come. ‘I fear I am compelled to disappoint, Lady Havington. Tanner went with the other boy, Finney. They left for London some weeks ago.’
2
Bianca kneels beside Bruno Barrani’s recumbent body. A sheen of sweat gleams on his brow. Along the hairline runs a thin violet tracery that she can’t quite identify. She dabs at it gently, fearing his wound has begun to bleed again. Then she realizes the sage-and-indigo dye he applies to his now-lank tresses has leached out a little. She almost weeps at this insult to Bruno’s cherished vanity. Worse still, his once-fine mustachios have wilted across his cheeks like dead ferns in a vase.
She remembers how, when she was a little girl, she would place the dolls that her mother made for her in a line, pretending they were in a ward at Padua’s great hospital and she was their nurse. In her young mind, they were not inanimate collections of straw and cloth with painted faces, but brave warriors wounded in battle; intrepid explorers, rescued at the last moment before starvation, or from the cannibal’s cooking-pot; poets driven to prostration by courtly love. And always male. Women, her Italian mother used to tell her, were by far the stronger sex. A good one never required so much as a moment’s rescuing. Indeed, a woman who got herself into a condition where she required rescuing was as much use to anybody as a cloth thimble.
Inevitably, when her mother died, Bianca had turned her restorative instincts upon her father, Simon Merton, himself a seeker of cures for the sick and troubled of Padua. They had lived a strange, precarious life. Bianca’s mother already possessed a dangerous fame for her skill at mixing balms and distilling curative potions from the herbs and flowers that grew in the warm soil of the Veneto. Her father, too, was coming to the attention of the Holy Office of the Faith. Though not a qualified physician, he would write books and pamphlets on such weighty matters as the workings of the cosmos – he was convinced the stars were prevented from falling to earth by the collective exhalation of all human breath – and the flow of blood through the body, which he was sure was controlled by the movement of the sun and moon around the earth. Listening to his angry polemic, she had understood from an early age the danger he was attracting by writing such things.
To deflect attention, she had tried to convince the Church that she was the most pious of all its flock: Signorina Bianca, Simon Merton’s little girl – the perfect Catholic. That way, she thought the Church might not look too closely at him.
And for a while her ploy had succeeded. Cardinal Fiorzi had thought her a little saint in the making – his Passerotto, his little sparrow. But in the end her father’s books had led to nothing but a cold death in a prison cell.
Bianca had carried those books with her to England, where Robert Cecil’s men had found them in her possession. Cecil had used them to coerce Nicholas into spying on John Lumley: Work for me, or Bianca Merton hangs for a papist witch. Cecil has them still. She suspects they’re on display somewhere in Cecil House, like the quarters of executed traitors they nail up in public places to deter sedition.
She knows, if she’s honest, that her instinct to save, to protect, to successfully resurrect in the face of overwhelming odds found a new purpose that October day last year, when Timothy discovered Nicholas Shelby lying in the Thames mud. And here I am again, she thinks, tending another of my mute heroes. Not a rag doll this time, but a corpse that doesn’t know it’s dead.
The chamber door opens and Rose returns, carrying a wicker basket full of clean linen. When the two women have washed Bruno, Bianca says, ‘I suppose we’d better take a look in that bag Signor Luzzi brought him from the Sirena. It might have a clean shirt in it. Or at least some favourite thing we can place beside the mattress as a comfort, in case he wakes up.’
Laid out on the floor, the contents are not an overly rich haul for an ambitious young merchant venturer. There’s a pewter bowl for his meals; a knife; two neatly folded shirts, one for daywear, the other for night; a purse – Bianca resists the temptation to open it, in search of a medallion with St Margaret of Antioch embossed on it, like the one Munt offered Bruno aboard the Sirena; a small book of what she assumes is poetry; the pair of fine black doeskin gloves she’d seen him wearing that first day at Galley Quay; a small brass astrolabe; and a neat pocket-compass of the same metal, folded and latched.
Out of pure curiosity, Bianca puts a thumbnail under the catch of the compass lid and springs it open. A little triangular fin pops up over the lodestone – a miniature sundial.
How clever, she thinks, as she folds it away and shuts the lid. But it’s of no use to Bruno now. He is following a course quite unmarked on any map, and no compass can help him find a safe landfall.
Next she picks up the book of verse, wishing she could read it to Bruno – soothe him somehow, aid his recovery. But it’s printed in Latin, a language she does not know, beyond the Mass – though it takes no effort to translate the author’s name, Jacopo Sannazaro.
But it’s the gloves that bring her closest to tears. They seem to her a symbol of the man himself, an elegant expression of his character: small but gloriously exuberant. She holds them up to inspect the fine embroidery that lies on the calfskin like a tracery of black veins.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she says to Rose. ‘If I were not a tavern-mistress and an apothecary, I think I should like to be a glover.’
Rose pushes back the curls that have slipped over her eyes. ‘Marry, mistress! Have you not quarrelled enough with the Grocers’ Guild? Now you want to pick a fight with the Worshipful Company of Glovers as well!’
‘Why shouldn’t a woman make gloves for a living?’ Bianca asks, with a stiffening of her jaw.
‘Because we’d all forget to eat and sleep,’ says Rose. ‘And we’d make far more of them than we have hands to fit them on! Look at the queen – I hear tell she has more gloves than subjects.’